Hi guys,
Well after the whole weekend of hell, trying to get my new SATA2 drives from Seagate to work on my Asus A8N-E, I'm there (or there-abouts) on an install.
I did a fresh XP install, just added Motherboard drivers, and nothing else, and then used HD Tachometer for a few benchmarks.
http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public...request=HdTach
I then installed XP on it's twin sister to confirm the speeds of both drives were equivalent (they were so close I was properly impressed at Seagate's consistency).
Then I set up a RAID array using those two disks, and ran the same thing exactly....just motherboard drivers, and nowt else.
Here are my results and you can decide yourself whether it's worthy of your time and money.
The Motherboard is an Asus A8N-E, with an Opteron 146 running at 10x250 HT4x =2500
2 gig of ram (4x512 sticks of Corsair Value Select)
2x Seagate 7200.9 drives, with Firmware versions of 3AAH (which I had to request from Seagate via email: the guys at Seagate always replied within 2 hours of my requests , so Seagate get 10/10 for effort here this weekend )
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=323522
Single Disk:
Random Access Time : 13.6 ms (this is a lot slower than my previous 10k SCSI disks)
Average Read Speed: 64.3 mb/s (this is a lot FASTER than my previous 10k SCSI drives)
Burst Speed: 254mb/s (this is so fast I nearly expired at it!!...but it is right on BOTH drives )
RAID 0, 2 identical drives, striped. Option in nForce RAID setup for largest striping blokc of 128k for performance use)
Random Access Time: 13.9 ms (tad slower than single disk)
Average Read Speed: 126mb/s (now IL-2 will load faster )
Burst Speed: 196mb/s (big drop off but still waaaaay faster than my SCSI stuff was)
Now, I'm not sure if real life will feel faster, in games, XP, film work etc..but RAID is here to stay for a while, and if anyone wants to ask anything, fire away
It's been along weekend: thanks go to my missus as ever, fopr being patient beyond belief